Voip.co.uk to expand with Firstcom

Telecommunications supplier Voip.co.uk is looking to expand into further overseas territories, following its acquisition of an 85 per cent stake in Danish unified communications provider Firstcom.

Chief technology officer Adam Crisp said the deal was a technology-based acquisition, which will allow the firm to integrate Firstcom’s mobile- focused unified communications offering into its existing product set.

Voip.co.uk has traditionally offered VoIP cloud-based services to call centres including its SIP Encrypt solution, which allows call centres dealing with card payments and other sensitive information to meet legal requirements which state that calls must be securely encrypted.

TheFirstcomdealwascompleted late last year and the firms have spent the past six months integrating their technology code- base together, prior to announcing the deal. Firstcom has already launched its next generation unified communications service

integrating Voip.co.uk’s security and billing features into its existing technology suite.

Voip.co.uk will launch an enhanced mobile product set under the Firstcom brand in the UK later this year, including a business-to-business MVNO.

Both firms have inhouse software teams and Crisp believes that Scandinavian companies are five years ahead of the rest of Europe due to the technological infrastructure that has been in place for many years in the region. It was for this reason that Voip. co.uk moved for the Danish firm.

“It was foremost a technology acquisition, we wanted access [to their software],” he said. “It’s time that you’re buying. It was quicker for us than to beef-up our teams to go and do that work.

“Plus, the knowledge and experience they had of working in that advanced arena which we hadn’t got. We’ve now got access to all their project management teams and product teams that are currently building the software that we will have in the UK.”

Voip.co.uk is now “actively looking” at other regions where it can buy ready-made customer bases and expand into those territories now it sees that its technological jigsaw is almost complete.

“We’ve built our technology base and we have got a team of people who are looking at other territories in general, and growth avenues that we need to do, to get the results that we’re looking for,” added Crisp.